RENEWABLE ENERGY: BIG IS BEAUTIFUL By Gar Lipow
I'm a renewable energy supporter; in fact I'm currently seeking a publisher for my book outlining how we could completely replace fossil fuels with renewable sources over the course of 30 years. But I have a beef with a large part of the renewable community – the belief that "Small is Beautiful".
Most renewable advocates sooner or later talk about "human scale," "decentralization." I think these terms don't mean what you think they mean; and I think their misuse is actively harmful to the both the renewable energy movement and to environmentalism.
Let's start by looking at some of the practical issues. Just how "small" and "decentralized" can some of our favorite technologies be? Take wind, for example. You can put one wind generator on a tower on a farm, or in the backyard of a rural home and generate all or most of that homes energy. Your cost will be about 15 cents per kWh – around the same price as the most cost effective PV. You can scale up and get a 2 MW unit to provide energy for a number of homes. That lowers your cost to 10 cents per kWh. But wind actually becomes competitive with fossil fuels in cost when you build in wind farm; put hundreds of towers next to each other, each generating 2-5 megawatts each. As wind farms grow larger you save in the following areas:
1) Parts and materials; wind generators, and towers are cheaper in bulk than one at a time.
2) Construction: getting a crew to build roads, and foundations, put up towers, and install the turbines and electrical infrastructure all at once is cheaper than a bunch of separate contracts.
3) Shared facilities; after you generate electricity from wind you have to convert it to a form the power company wants. Sharing that equipment among multiple generators is cheaper than having one set for each turbine.
4) Wind turbines require operations and maintenance; but with one generator there is not enough work to employ anybody in-house. Grouping a number of them together into a wind farms provides enough predictable labor requirements to let you hire skilled full time workers to take care of them.
In short wind generation shows economies of scale. What is more, even the largest wind farms currently in operation show no signs of having reached the upper limit where you get diseconomies of scale instead.
I've told friends this, and heard them respond "To hell with wind; in a few years we'll have cheap solar cells, and install them in a decentralized form". In a previous post I warned of the fallacy of expecting technical breakthroughs to come on a predetermined schedule. Even the Manhattan project produced the first atomic bomb after the Hitler was dead, and Germany occupied. But I strongly suspect that we could, in fact, get cheap solar cells any time we wanted to.
Solar cells give every sign of being a classic chicken/egg problem. Because demand is low we never get large factories with full economies of scale to bring down the price of solar cells. Because the price is high demand stays low. (In addition, current factories mostly depend on scrap silicon from chip makers -- which subjects PV manufacturers to a silicon shortage during any major downturn in the computer industry.)
A Danish Study (conducted for Greenpeace) suggests a large scale supply side approach – building a giant large scale PV factory accompanied by a large scale plant to manufacture solar grade silicon. The cost would be well under a billion in today's dollars.
Note though what this implies. The idea to build a large scale factory with an integrated supply chain – is not exactly a "Small is Beautiful" approach to begin with. Further, economies of scale would not stop with that factory. The reason private industry will never do this is the first successful large scale solar cell manufacturing plant will be a sacrificial lamb. As soon as the market is established, other manufactures will move in with technical improvements, and even larger factories with greater economies of scale. Thus though solar cells may be deployed in a decentralized manner, they will be based on components produced in very centralized facilities indeed – like the computer chip industry.
Nor will deployment be entirely decentralized. If the cost is brought down, solar cells on rooftops, south walls and windows can provide much of our electricity but not all. A percentage will need to be deployed on highway walls, and possibly even be used to roof over roads.
More to the point storage won't be decentralized. Flow batteries, capacitors, and Li-Ion batteries have huge economies of scale. So does hydrogen production and storage. Even if you produce all your own electricity (which I suspect most won't), odds are you will get storage and backup from your friendly neighborhood utility company.
In short we are not going to be able to escape from large centralized production; and really that is no great tragedy. I read Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" back in 1977 . He never talked exclusively about small scale production. He talked about appropriate scale production – pointing out that, for example, you would not want to build small scale steel plants. He did point that under modern capitalism diseconomies of scale were often ignored, and that this had great human costs.
Democracy was almost as important to important to him as scale. He even wanted it applied to economics, suggesting that where large corporations could not be eliminated (and he considered that in many cases they couldn't) that half their shares (a controlling interest) be taken by the state, and the control this ownership gave should be divided among stakeholders to provide real economic democracy.
I don't want to be misleading; Schumacher did make a fetish of avoiding large scale production when possible, and also supported end to economic growth - a steady state economy. I think this misunderstands what growth really is – a measurement of an increase in what the economy values. Does anyone believe we don't want to see an increase in certain things – well fed, well educated, well loved children? Don't we want housing for the homeless, health care for the sick, work for the jobless, leisure for the overworked? We don't need to stop growth, but we need a type of society that would define these as essential parts of growth, and would not count any increased production that decreased them as an improvement. Similarly it is wrong that our economic system promotes growth that threatens the eco-system on which it is based; but it is also poor accounting that an economic increase that "eats the seed corn" should even count as growth.
Don't oppose growth; oppose an economics that deals with "goods" and "services", but ignores "bads" and "disservices". Don't oppose large scale production when it is the most sustainable means to provide something essential; oppose unfettered control of that production by a tiny elite group.
Historically scale has never correlated with democracy. Yes ancient Egypt was a rigid bureaucratic slave society; but the city-state of Sparta was (if anything) worse. The breakup of Yugoslavia brought no increase democracy or well-being, as the agony of Kosovo and Bosnia can testify. I don't think any argument can be made that if the South had succeeded in breaking away from the U.S. in the 19th century, to continue slavery a bit longer, and perhaps through conquest expand it to Mexico, that the world would have been freer or more sustainable.
Yes all sorts of evils occur in large institutions; but if you have ever seen a sweatshop, plenty happens in small businesses as well. I've known small family businesses to treat least favored family members as horribly as any large corporation ever treated a disposable, faceless employee. If you want democratization, fight for more democracy; if you want that extended from politics to economics, support that. If you want political power decentralized, support a decentralized political system. If you are a humanitarian, support more humane policies; if you believe fundamental flaws in our system produce bad results, then support radical change. But don't become a crude technological determinist and assume that confining most production within a certain size will contribute significantly to any of these things.